The paper “Taking Arduino to the Internet of Things: the ASIP programming model” by Gianluca Barbon, Michael Margolis, Filippo Palumbo, Franco Raimondi and Nick Weldin has been accepted for publication in Elsevier Computer Communication.

The paper describes the details of a programming model for micro-controllers, introducing network support for point-to-point and publish/subscribe (MQTT) mechanisms. The code supporting the paper is available from:

Massimo will work with Dr. Nikos Gorogiannis on the curriculum and the teaching of the Correctness of Computer Systems module (a third year option for CS students).

As part of his visiting professorship, Massimo gave a talk for the seminar series organised by Dr. Giuseppe Primiero on CS topics in academia and industry. The full video of the talk is available at these links:

We started collecting tweets related to the UK General Elections at the end of January, exactly 100 days before election day. We are now one week away from the elections on the 7th of May and we can already do some analysis. We have collected tweets mentioning one of the following users:

At the moment we have approximately 2.3 million tweets. This is the daily relative popularity of the five groups above (click for a larger version):

On average, Cameron (or Conservatives) and Miliband (or UKLabour) seem to be the most mentioned users (around 30% each), followed by Farage (20%), followed by Nick Clegg and Natalie Bennett (10% each). Some exceptions are on the 24th of February for Natalie Bennet (40%) and on 22nd of March for Nigel Farage (63%). These two days correspond, respectively, to Natalie Bennett’s interview on LBC and to Nigel Farage’s interview with Andrew Marr.

We have computed the sentiment of each tweet and then computed the average sentiment. This is a number between -1 (completely negative sentiment) and +1 (completely positive sentiment). We have employed the vaderSentiment tool and the result is that, overall, the sentiment is 0.057 (slightly positive). We have also computed the average sentiment for tweets mentioning only one of the candidates+party. The results are:

David_Cameron or Conservatives: 0.019

ED_Miliband or UKLabour: 0.053

Nick_Clegg or LibDems: 0.091

Nigel_Farage or UKIP: 0.036

Natalieben or TheGreenParty: 0.163

We computed the most used words, excluding so-called “stop words” such as “the”, “is”, etc., and considering only the root of words. The overall top 40 words are (sorted from most to least used):

“RT if you would like to politely ask @Ed_Miliband to clarify why he used the loaded word “Islamophobia” & exactly WHAT he plans to outlaw.”, by RichardDawkins, retweeted 1146 times.

Approximately 1.1M tweets are retweets (47.5 %), and approximately 712K tweets are “reply-to” (31 %). These are interesting figures when compared with other national elections. For instance, in the case of Twitter traffic associated to the candidates for the Nigerian elections, retweets constitute 56.5% of the overall traffic, while reply-to are only approximately 5%.

We are looking for a research fellow to work on the XMF/XModeler toolset. The post is for 36 months, in collaboration with the Department of Information Systems and Enterprise Modelling at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany.

The Arduino Service Interface Protocol is a protocol developed at Middlesex University to control Arduino boards from other devices, such as a laptops, Raspberry Pi boards, etc. More details about the protocol are available at https://github.com/michaelmargolis/asip.